NCWTS: ERIK JONES Ride the Bottom and Stay on Top

MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Oct. 19, 2015) – Erik Jones and the No. 4 Toyota Racing team head to Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway for the fred’s 250 with a four-point lead in the Truck Series championship standings with five races remaining. The team hopes that Saturday’s 94-lap race is an uneventful one, as Jones continues his quest to bring home Kyle Busch Motorsports’ (KBM) first-ever driver’s championship and the organization’s third consecutive and fourth overall owner’s championship.

The Truck Series championship points leader enters this weekend’s race with a streak of 10 consecutive top-10 finishes. After the eighth race of the season at Gateway Motorsports Park in Madison, Ill., Jones found himself fourth in points, 33 behind Matt Crafton. His recent run of top-10 finishes, which has included wins at Iowa Speedway and Canadian Tire Motorsport Park in Bowmanville, Ont., has propelled him to the top of the championship standings, where he sits four points ahead of the two-time reigning champion.

Jones made his first-ever superspeedway start in last year’s Truck Series event at Talladega. The talented youngster avoided incident as he ran solidly inside the top 10 throughout the race and was scored in the fourth position when a late-race caution set up a green-white-checkered finish. After the field took the white flag he got shuffled outside of the top 10 through turns 1 and 2, but made a huge run down the frontstretch to catapult himself up to sixth before reaching the finish line.

The Rookie of the Year candidate got his 2015 Truck Series season off to a solid start at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway in February. Jones qualified seventh for the superspeedway event and logged an average running position of 3.7 throughout the 100-lap campaign. Nine trucks were lined up single file when the field took the white flag, including the No. 4 Tundra in the fourth position. Off of turn four, Scott Lagasse Jr., who ran third, looked to the inside of Austin Theriault for the second position. The two knocked doors and Jones quickly darted to the outside lane, while Ray Black Jr. went to the bottom lane and made it a four-wide battle for the runner-up position. Jones was able to nudge the trio to the stripe and earn an impressive second-place finish in his first career start at the “World Center of Racing.”

Jones’ strategy for this weekend’s race at Talladega is simple:  ride the bottom line, come out of the race with a top-10 finish and stay on top of the championship standings. Executing that strategy and avoiding “the big one” will be the difficult task.

“The biggest thing we’ve done there in the past that has worked out well has just been staying on the bottom and staying out of trouble and trying to stay up front and stay out of trouble. We did a good job last year of staying out of trouble and getting a top-10 finish out of it. Hopefully this year we can do the same. As long as we can bring home a top 10, lead a lap or two and get some good points out of it that would be a good day for us. I feel like we can make up some more points at some other tracks rather than there, as long as we can just get through Talladega.”

“Yes and no. As far as race strategy and chassis adjustments — there isn’t a lot you can do.  It is agonizing in the fact that throughout the weekend you know that one wrong move by another driver — in practice or the race — and the months of hard work  your team has put into this one race can go away in an instant because of something someone else did.”

KBM-13: The No. 4 Toyota Racing team will unload KBM-13 for Saturday’s fred’s 250 at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. Jones piloted the Tundra to a runner-up finish in the Truck Series season opener at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway and also finished sixth with it in his superspeedway debut at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway last October.

Date	Site	Driver	Start	Finish	Laps	Laps Led	Status
2/20/15	Daytona	Jones	7	2	100/100	0	running
10/18/14	Talladega	Jones	6	6	95/95	1	running
2/21/14	Daytona	Busch	7	1	100/100	25	running
10/19/13	Talladega	Coulter	9	27	79/94	1	accident
2/24/13	Daytona	Coulter	10	22	100/100	0	running

Ryan “Rudy” Fugle will call the shots for Erik Jones’ Truck Series championship campaign in 2015. The New York native led KBM’s No. 51 Tundra team to a series-leading six wins, including Jones’ first-career victory at Phoenix International Raceway, and an Owner’s Championship as crew chief in 2013. He has eight career wins as a Truck Series crew chief, five with Kyle Busch behind the wheel and three with Jones as the pilot. He also contributed to an additional 11 wins in his role as race engineer for the organization during the 2012 and 2014 seasons. Before coming to KBM, Fugle held crew chief positions in both the Truck Series and XFINITY Series with Germain Racing.

Fugle’s lone race calling the shots for a Truck Series race at Talladega resulted in a 10^th-place finish with Kyle Busch in 2013.